God.

I’ve always had a very strained relationship with the concept of religion. I was raised Catholic, which means I’m no longer Catholic. Ba-dum-tiss.

The closest man-made religion I identify with now would probably be Buddhism, but even that isn't formal. I don't belong to a particular tradition. I don't have a neat little box I can check when someone asks what I believe.

I fought against God for years.

Not just religion.

God.

I would hear Christian music or read Christian books and articles and immediately roll my eyes. Church made me uncomfortable. I was weird, but the people in attendance were somehow weirder.

I still cringe when I think about services where people lift their hands as they speak, eyes closed, voices shaking with such rawness that it almost makes me embarrassed to witness it. It felt like watching someone string together a line of random thoughts—a song of sorrow and reverence that I had no interest in hearing.

I hated it.

No one needs to hear how thankful you are, Almighty Lord, and how benevolent you are.

Kids die of cancer.

People suffer every day.

I suffer every day.

So where exactly is all this benevolence?

For a long time, I couldn't reconcile the God I was being taught to worship with the world I was actually living in.

But where I am now, the irritability is still there. The embarrassment is still there. Some of the shame is still there.

What's changed is that I've made peace with other people's beliefs.

If God, Heaven, and Christianity are the only sources of salvation my dying best friend has, why would I want to take that from her with my disbelief or ridicule?

I wouldn't.

As long as someone else's beliefs aren't being used to harm people, go for it.

I've realized that I don't have to believe what someone else believes in order to respect their right to believe it.

And I've also realized that my own spirituality doesn't need to look like anyone else's.

I believe there's so much to learn during our lives. I'm very spiritual. I believe in souls, energy, and reincarnation. I believe in purpose and a lack of purpose. I believe everything can have meaning and everything can teach us something.

I've become one of those everything happens for a reason people.

Not necessarily because I think there is some divine architect sitting above us arranging every tragedy for our eventual character development.

Sometimes awful things just happen.

But my life here on Earth, in this mortal realm, is too short to spend all of it agonizing over why I was sexually assaulted, why I was abused growing up, or why I am now knee-deep in grief and beginning to drown in the amount of death surrounding me.

If this life is full of suffering, perhaps my next life will have reward.

Maybe there is another chapter.

Maybe there isn't.

I don't know.

All I can do is try to be as good as I can while I'm here.

When I want to slip into something a little more spiritual, I love listening to podcasts about death and near-death experiences. I love candles. I love healing crystals.

But one of my absolute favorite rituals is journaling.

Anything is possible through writing, and that includes going toe-to-toe with your shadow self. I think that's paramount to developing spiritually.

Journaling gives me a place to examine my beliefs and watch them change as I'm exposed to new ideas. I can look back at things I was absolutely certain about five years ago and think, Oh, honey.

I've found so much peace in aging because experience eventually starts to equal answers.

Not all the answers.

But more answers.

Every year, I uncover another little piece of what I think life's truths might be, and I want to compile them all and shout them from the town square like a squire who has just discovered fire.

I want to help someone younger, or someone more broken than I was, start healing sooner.

If I knew at eighteen what I know now about death, suffering, love, and hope, I probably would have been well on my way to becoming a New Age prophet.

Luckily, you were spared.

And now you're reading this instead.

We Are the Gods

One of my favorite passages I've read about falling out of religion and losing faith goes something like this:

“I no longer want to feel like I’m incapable, or inherently flawed, or unable to do things without God. It feels more empowering, great, and wonderful to believe in myself, and know I can do things because I can. And that I’m not a product of sin, but a human being with wishes, hopes, and dreams. I have infinite possibilities, not because a God allows it to be so, but because humanity has been; for thousands of years, in the midst of evil, war, and greed, working to also create goodness, and build a better world…”

I first read that passage years ago.

All these years later, I still love the idea behind it.

In a strange way, I think we are the gods of our own lives.

We rule ourselves because we have free will.

We have the ability to make choices, create things, destroy things, hurt people, heal people, love people, and change the world around us.

And sometimes I think religion can become a convenient scapegoat for evil.

The devil made me do it.

God told me to.

It was part of His plan.

Those explanations can become dangerous when they remove personal accountability.

If I hurt someone, I hurt someone.

I don't get to outsource the responsibility for my actions to an invisible force.

Forgiveness Has Always Bothered Me

Something that has never sat quite right with me is the concept of forgiveness in Christianity, particularly the way I understood it growing up Catholic.

Catholic confession is far more complicated than simply confessing something and receiving a few prayers as a transaction. But as a child, what I understood was essentially this:

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been ten years since my last confession.

Confess.

Repent.

Receive penance.

Be forgiven.

And as a child, that concept bothered me.

Because what happens when the sin is enormous?

Can someone commit something absolutely horrific and then genuinely repent and be forgiven?

What does forgiveness even mean when the person who was harmed doesn't get to participate in it?

What does justice look like if the person who caused unimaginable suffering can eventually be welcomed into Heaven?

I don't have an answer to that.

Maybe that's because I'm still carrying a very human understanding of justice: actions have consequences.

I have a hard time imagining that suffering can simply be erased because someone said the right words afterward.

Hell Terrified Me

My relationship with Hell is even more complicated.

I grew up hearing about Hell when I was very young, and I remember being terrified of it.

I was six years old.

I lied.

I stole a Pokémon card.

Obviously, I was going to Hell.

I think I spent a portion of my childhood convinced that I was fundamentally bad and that there was some cosmic scorecard keeping track of every mistake I'd ever made.

And the theology of Hell has never stopped bothering me.

Different Abrahamic traditions understand the afterlife, judgment, punishment, and salvation differently. Even within Christianity, there are enormous disagreements about what Hell actually is, who goes there, whether it is eternal, and what salvation means.

But as a child, nuance didn't matter.

Hell was forever.

And forever is an absolutely terrifying concept when you're six.

I remember thinking, surely someone as awful as my six-year-old self is going there for lying and stealing a Pokémon card.

I'm pretty sure I've repented adequately by now.

Sorry about the Pokémon card.

I'll say my ten Hail Marys.

What If Nobody Has the Whole Answer?

Another idea I've always found fascinating is how threatening it can feel for a person to admit that something outside their religion might have validity.

If your entire worldview depends upon your religion being the singular, absolute truth, then another possibility isn't merely another possibility.

It becomes a threat to the foundation.

Christians can't believe in reincarnation because, within traditional Christian theology, reincarnation contradicts core teachings about resurrection and the afterlife.

Other religions have entirely different ideas about what happens after death.

Every tradition has its own teachings, prophets, doctrines, cosmologies, and endgames.

And I can't help wondering:

If spirituality is supposed to be a personal relationship with something greater than ourselves, why are humans so determined to fight over whose relationship is correct?

That feels like such a profoundly human ego problem.

I'm right.

You're wrong.

My God is real.

Your God isn't.

My path leads to salvation.

Your path leads to damnation.

What if we're all looking at the same mountain from different sides?

What if we're looking at completely different mountains?

What if there isn't a mountain?

I don't know.

And, honestly, I like not knowing.

“You Could Be Wrong.”

A friend once told me I could take solace in the fact that she could be wrong.

We had talked for hours in a parking lot about her beliefs and mine, and about how incompatible they seemed.

I remember feeling insulted.

I felt cheated by God.

And, in some ways, I felt cheated by her.

I wasn't going to Hell simply because I didn't share her beliefs.

I was still a good person.

We eventually started wondering whether perhaps whatever you believe happens after death is what happens.

Maybe your consciousness creates your experience.

Maybe Heaven exists.

Maybe reincarnation exists.

Maybe nothing exists.

Maybe the answer is stranger than anything we have imagined.

For a moment, that possibility gave both of us some room to breathe.

But it was ultimately too much leeway for her faith.

She shook it off and returned to certainty:

No. Only Hell for non-Christians. I care about you, and I hope you can someday make the right choice so we can be in Heaven together.

And there it was again.

You're wrong.

I'm right.

There is one correct answer, and it is mine.

I think that's the part I struggle with most.

Not faith.

Certainty.

I Don't Have the Answers

I'm not writing any of this to take offense at Christianity or Christians.

I realize I don't have all the answers.

I might be completely wrong about everything.

That's actually part of the fun.

I'm open to learning.

I'm always blown away when I'm welcomed without judgment by a Christian. I've mainly used Christianity as my example because that's the religion I've had the most personal experience with, but I know there are countless people of other faiths who approach their beliefs with the same generosity.

I think religion and spirituality can be wonderful tools when they aren't being abused.

If you need that kind of structure to determine your morality, more power to you.

Extra Heaven points!

But I also have an enormous amount of respect for people who don't need a religious text to tell them how to be good.

People who choose compassion because they believe compassion is good.

People who choose kindness because another human being is hurting.

People who choose honesty when nobody is watching.

People who choose humanity as their guiding compass.

Thank you.

Thank you for choosing goodness because you want to be good.

Thank you for helping someone because you believe they deserve help.

Thank you for making this life better rather than waiting for the next one to reward you for it.

Maybe there is a Heaven.

Maybe there is reincarnation.

Maybe there is absolutely nothing.

Maybe we're all wrong.

But if this is the only life we get, I want mine to have been kind.

And if there is something waiting for us afterward?

Well.

I suppose I'll find out.

I'm sure there's another thousand things I could say about growing up Catholic, the trauma religion has caused me, the pain that judgment has inflicted on me, my thoughts about why we're here and what the point of all this is, the things I've learned about spirituality, and the religious teachings I've researched over the years.

Maybe I'll add to this periodically.

Maybe it'll become a Part 2.

Knowing me, it probably will.

For now, though, this is where I stand:

I don't know what's out there.

And for the first time in my life, I'm okay with that.